The fish too were a conspiracy, more evocations of Istanbul—a pair of Taylor blues and a pair of mackerel but Spanish, a more flamboyant looking species than their Asian cousins, their sleek undersides lit up with a fluorescence of blue dappled with yellow spots. Oh my God, she blurted like her seventeen-year-old self as she and Eville came together. Your fish are beautiful.
They were running, he said, his eyes replaying the excitement.
You’re happy, she said as they turned back toward the camp.
I’m topped out, he said. But hey, come on, how are you?
She said better but what she meant to say was, Yes, I’m happy too.
At sunset thunderheads gathered over the mainland, the gloaming exploded with columns of a whiteness more alive and grand than any primary color she had ever seen, and she crossed the beach from the water to camp carrying a filet knife and the scaled and gutted fish, Eville looking up appreciatively from his crouch, kindling his cook fire, saying, Where’d you learn to do that? and she arched her eyebrows and said, Seriously, Burnette? Clean a mackerel? She laid the fish out on a plank of scavenged driftwood and butterflied them along the spine and went to the dry box in the back of the truck for olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper, and a lemon. Cook two for dinner and save two for breakfast, Eville suggested, and when she glanced back across the fire at him, his eyes gleamed, his vision a hostage of her levitated breasts, escaped from their cups. She said she would put on a T-shirt. If you want, he told her, but he said he’d rather just enjoy the unobstructed view, and she reached behind her to unclasp the strap and said, Well then, there, letting him look as he wished, a symbiotic liberty, his look itself calmly arousing, until she slapped at a horsefly on her ankle and said the bugs were beginning to drive her crazy and she needed to put on that shirt.
Yep, he said, saying the wind had shifted, blowing in mosquitoes from the salt marshes.
I’m taking care of you tonight, she said, returning from the tent, her legs and arms shiny with repellent, and he helped her position the grilling rack over the coals where she set two unhusked ears of white corn to roast and then went to work at the lowered tailgate, slicing cucumbers, onions, and tomatoes for a simple vinaigrette salad. Want a beer? he asked, going to the cooler. She said, How about a rum and Coke, and he made them both Cuba Libres and they shared a cigarette while she finished with the prep. Burnette, she said, I should tell you why I’ve been sick, and he preempted her confession, he supposed it was the cocaine, hard to throw that monkey, and she told him it was nothing to be proud of, she had run through her stash, voraciously, deliberately, okay, but still, and if he set out a line right now—
Stop, he said. It’s over.
But you should know.
You loved the dope.
Yeah, there’s that. The Agency doesn’t select homemakers to send out into Indian country.
Right. What were the other chicks like, in your training group?
Don’t ask. You don’t want to know. In a hand-to-hand exercise—actually, it was the final exam—one of them used her menstrual blood as a weapon. She wiped it on the instructor’s face. Honest to God. We all stood there speechless. You have to admit, as a tactical countermove it was inspired. She was being dominated but she worked an arm free, stuck her hand down the front of her sweatpants, pulled out her tampon and swabbed the poor guy. He freaked out, like gack!, broke contact, and she beat the tar out of him.
Oh, man, said Eville, laughing uncomfortably. That’s vile.
She didn’t want to lose.
They sat side by side at the fire and she rolled the corn until the husks were uniformly blackened and then grilled the fish and fixed their plates, Ev given the Taylor blue, taking the mackerel for herself, each feeding bites to the other to savor the difference in taste. Burnette, finishing with a satiated groan, lay back in the sand to proclaim, That fucking meal—now that’s America, as though this moment somehow represented everything he ever wanted in his life, and he propped himself on his elbows so that she could see the fullness of his face, the wordless addition to his thanks for the food, To have a day and a meal like this, to have these days with her, saying, trying to say, this is the land that I love. Were there ever better days?
Of course that’s what he had meant, not quite what he had articulated, and she stared out at the darkness to the east as they waited for the moon to rise and said, I still don’t feel at home here.
But it’s your home, he said. It’s who you are.
Is it? she said. I haven’t lived in the States long enough to be sentimental about this. Out there—she gestured toward the ocean, across the ocean—it’s like my drug of choice. It makes me high in a way that makes me real. You must have felt it, being deployed.
But you have to come back.
Why?
To take the cure. For being too real.
Yeah? Is that like a white people disease?
Montana’s a good place for that. So’s here. Let your life mean something else for a while.
Something less. Do you want to go for a swim?
He said excellent and when she returned from the tent with towels he was standing over the fire, his nakedness sculpted by the flickering light. She stripped too, quickly, with an unfamiliar self-consciousness for her body, shrunken and gaunt from abuse, not looking at him watching, her sense of humility appealing in a way she understood to be perverse. They pretended to race to the water and she dropped the towels above the tide line and grabbed his hand as they splashed into the shallows high-stepping toward the waves, unjoined by the first one that knocked them off their feet, the second one sending them under, but she knew how to resign herself to an undertow until just the right moment to scissor free. She swam ahead submerged in black and when she surfaced outside of the break she could hear Ev somewhere behind her in the fizzle of the last wave, calling her name.
I’m here, she said, treading in the frigid water, I’m here, she said, but not loud enough to be found.
In the morning she woke to the sound of a horn, a staccato double-bleat, and poked her bleary-eyed head through the door of the tent to observe Eville bent at the driver’s window of an avocado-colored SUV, in conversation with a uniformed park ranger wearing sunglasses and a wide-brimmed hat, and she watched until the vehicle drove off and then scurried behind the dunes to relieve herself. When she came back Eville was pouring hot coffee into two mugs and she took hers with contrite gratitude and said, What was that about?
Guess there’s a storm coming, he said, blowing steam off his cup, slurping, his eyes inquisitive as he tested her equilibrium with a smile. The ranger had advised him that the last ferry was leaving at four and then there wouldn’t be another for a day or maybe two.
She asked if they had to evacuate and he told her it was up to them. There was no official order but they were going to get slapped by the tail end of a late-season northeaster, there would be wind and some overwash, they’d be wise to move their camp up a few feet to higher ground, but if they were prepared to be isolated without hitting the panic button, they shouldn’t have a problem beyond a good soaking. It’s your call, he said. You’ve had a rough couple of days. Maybe you want to get out of here. Maybe we should go, she said. You have to be pretty well fed up with me by now.
Nope.
I’m such a fucking wreck. I don’t want you to hate me.
We checked off that option, he said. If you weren’t here, doing what you’re doing, what would you be doing?
Trying to score. Scoring.
What you’re going through, he said. You need me.
No. Maybe. Is that okay?
Stranded with a needy woman? he grinned. Every guy’s dream.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It was a gorgeous balmy morning, lethargic brush-stroked clouds above the ocean, and she look
ed around, sipping her coffee, refreshed, feeling at the end of something bad. Is this the calm before the storm? she asked.
Looks like it, he said, and she said then let’s stay and he smiled and said, Yes, ma’am.
She withdrew to the privacy of the tent to attend to her neglected self, changing into her bathing suit and tugging a comb through her scary clown hair, opening her compact case to stare briefly into its mirror before she snapped it shut, a dismissal of Renee, who would have shrieked at her haggard unmade face and devoted the next inviolable thirty minutes to cosmetic repair. Renee, Renee and Jack—God! she said out loud, shuddering. Jack was sitting right this moment behind bars in the federal building in Miami and she thought, money laundering, drug running, extortion, world class venality, material assistance to the nation’s enemies, murder, for Christ’s sake, what more do you need? Keep him there, but she knew a half-dozen agencies in the government needed him out and gone before he opened his mouth. By the time she crawled back into the sunshine Eville had fixed a breakfast of delicious sandwiches, fried fish and egg and tomato, and they decided to spend the rest of the morning clamming in the sound, driving back down to the mouth of the cove behind the ferry landing, Burnette raking and Dottie meandering through the warm flats just using her toes, carrying her haul in the front of her bikini bottom until she had stuffed it so full of cherrystones her pants were falling down, Ev bent with laughter at the sight of her. When she hooked her thumbs into her waistband and lowered the front panel to let the clams plunk out into his bucket, he smiled, devilish, Cheshire rat, saying, Is there one more? and she looked at him sideways, sultry, and said, That one stays.
Afterward they explored southward until they arrived at the desolate inlet, empty of fishermen but its sand littered with the huge flyblown skeletons of redfish. Dottie was astounded by their size and Eville, rhapsodizing, said before we leave the island, we’re going to get you one.
They stowed their books and sand chairs and extra clothes in the back of the truck with the coolers and fishing gear and drove up the beach toward the unsettled horizon of the approaching weather, Portsmouth now their private sanctuary. They were alone, the first humans or the last, not lawless on the frontier, certainly, but readily succumbing to the temptations of the unwatched and unregulated, the happy delinquencies of life before the park service, passing the bottle of tequila back and forth between them on the joyride up the beach, their spirits synchronized and boisterous. At the end of the ride they had arrived at the limits of their world, the vast sand flats like a miniature Gobi Desert creating the northernmost tip of the island and beyond that the inlet beginning to churn with a rising tide and beyond that the smudge of land that was the pirate haven of Ocracoke.
They parked as far out onto the Atlantic side of the point as they could drive, where the treachery of shoals mounded and arced a mile out toward the entrance to the inlet’s channel. Eville sat on the tailgate rigging Dottie’s surf rod with a thick filament of forty-pound line, a wire leader and sliding nugget of lead weight, and a large barbed hook shiny with malice and baited with a hunk of thawed mullet. He asked if she wanted him to cast for her and she put her hands on her hips and said, Is this my rod? He said yep and she said, No, and took it from him, wading waist-deep into the shorebreak to heave the line out along the base of the nearest shoal and Ev said, What is it you don’t know how to do? She walked the rod back up the slope of the beach, reeling in the slack and planting the butt in the holder he had staked into the sand, next to their chairs, and sat down with tequila and her book.
Nothing to it, he said, Dottie detecting a slight air of superiority in his voice. Eville hoisted the straps of his bib waders over his bare shoulders and spent the next several minutes fussing with his rod and tackle box. Then he was ready and clomped over to where she sat to take a gulp from the bottle, grinning down at her slyly, pleased with himself for having something clever to say. This is his and hers fishing, he said.
Yeah? She smiled crookedly. How?
You’re on the bottom, I have the top.
She gaped at him, feigning astonishment, before she sniggered. God, Burnette. You just cracked another sex joke. I think I need to be on guard.
Something like that, he said, taking another slug before he strode down the bank into the inlet, stepping into a drop-off that threatened to fill his waders before he found his footing and lunged up onto a bar where the waves foamed around his knees.
She watched him for a while, mesmerized by his art, the backhand grace and looping precision that were the pride of every fly fisherman but when his luck hadn’t turned she picked up The Odyssey from the sand to read and read until she began to doze as the clouds moved closer and the light changed. The next thing she knew she was wrenched alert by a incipient sense of emergency and she saw Eville, perhaps fifty yards from shore, waving his arms at her, his whoops barely audible, and then she heard the buzzy humming of her line, run out completely to its knot on the spool, before she noticed the rod itself, its stiff fiberglass bowed with the pressure of something strong and big. She sprang to her feet to grip the shaft with both hands as she released it from the holder but when she did the torque of the fish was overpowering, dragging her into the water, amazed that the line could withstand such tension without breaking.
She lowered the tip of the rod to gain slack but when she tried to crank the reel after two wraps she was locked again into a stalemate of resistance, the fish edging her farther into the water while Eville slogged furiously toward shore and then the bottom went out from under him and he disappeared, submerged by the deadly weight pouring into his waders, only the fly rod in his upraised hand visible, marking his position, and she had a moment to tell herself they were identical in their stubbornness, suicidal almost, neither of them willing to lose a rod or a fish or anything else. She lay on her belly and kicked, letting whatever was on the end of her own line help, sledding her deeper into the surf until she was close enough to angle her body sideways to Eville and snatch his wrist and in a few seconds their feet began to bump along the slope of a sand bar and Eville’s head bobbed up like a hapless Poseidon, gagging water and half-drowned. She let go of him then and stood up and planted her heels, determined to carry on with her struggle against her leviathan, whatever monster this was on the end of her line. Eville tried to thrust himself higher onto the bar but the waders held him down. Drop your rod, she said. He sputtered back, Drop yours. Finally he managed to slip the straps from his shoulders and peel the top of the rubber overalls to his waist.
Let me have the rod.
Get away.
Take mine and give me yours.
No fucking way.
He was out of danger now, standing next to her, the draining waders down to his knees like a man interrupted taking a crap. Come on, he said, give it to me.
Hey, she snarled. Back off. No.
Just let me take it for a minute to get a feel for what’s on.
The muscles in her forearm were corded from the strain, her biceps bulged, and no matter how much effort she threw into the fight she felt the fish would best her, the line snap, the hook shake free. Then they both saw the line slacken and Eville yelled, Reel! Reel! and she did, grunting through clenched teeth, saying, Excuse me, weren’t you busy drowning?
But they were giddy now, sharing the exhilaration of the battle, and she reeled frantically for a moment before she began to think the fish was lost, Eville groaning with disappointment—Is he off? He’s off—yet the line went taut again and flew out of the reel in a siren’s pitch as the fish made its desperate run from the shoals toward open water. Eville almost tackled her from behind, laughing maniacally, wrapping his arms around her middle. He gripped his hands on the rod between her hands, saying, Come on now, share, and she thought, Oh, okay, I like the way this works, and together they broke the fish’s run, Eville’s stubbled jaw nuzzling her neck, Dottie feignin
g reproval, Stop it, the waves at the front of the bar slamming against her hips and the butt of the rod pressed at her crotch and Eville pasted against her backside.
Okay, okay, Eville cheered, we got the son of a bitch. She cranked forever, so it seemed, without seeing the catch until Eville said, Hold up, we don’t want him short-lined this far out, let’s get back to the beach where he can’t escape, and so she opened the bail to ease out line and they dropped into the cut and frog-kicked spastically back to shore and she resumed reeling until the line angled down into the cut between bar and shore, the fight gone from the beast, and she pulled and reeled until the widened jaws slowly emerged like the prow of a submarine from the murky water and Eville there at the water’s edge, ready to pounce on the thing, made one of those yodeling rebel yells.
The eyes emerged, big and dumb as a cow’s, and then the enormous bulk of the fish’s head, an unearthly refulgence of the most dazzling orange, a bejeweled horror although not so horrible as beautiful, and then, after several more cranking revolutions, nothing—pale tatters of shredded flesh, like a flag ripped apart in a high wind, streaming in the current.
Motherfucker, Eville howled. We’ve been robbed.
She walked the rod higher up the beach, dismayed and angry herself, dragging the disembodied head out of the water. Eville dashed to the truck for his handheld scale, speculating from the remaining twelve pounds that the shark had taken forty. There’s still good meat here, he said, carving out the scallops of the drum’s cheeks and the triangles at both sides of its throat.
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover Page 73
